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Gitmo Soldiers Get 9/11 History Lessons

Military officers stand at the entrance to Camp VI and V at the U.S. military prison on June 25, 2013, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Twelve years after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI reminds soldiers at Guantanamo who they're guarding. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Young soldiers at Guantanamo Bay would have been in grade school when the 9/11 attacks occurred. But the government is making sure the terrorist attacks are fresh in their minds.

The FBI now holds briefings for military personnel stationed at Guantanamo about the attacks and their connection to the island prison. Five detainees are currently being tried for their role in plotting 9/11. There are 161 other prisoners there too, about half of whom have been cleared for transfer.

We received eight pages of the FBI’s 17-slide PowerPoint presentation after filing a Freedom of Information Act request. We filed the request after a Huffington Post report cited the briefings, saying they “left many participants in tears.”

Spokespeople for the FBI and the military at Guantanamo did not respond to requests for more details about the briefings, so it’s not clear how often they are given, or when they started. The released slides also don’t show anything about current detainees, so we don’t know how the FBI relates them to 9/11.

8 comments

And…how many of these inmates, exactly, were actual terrorists, again? Wasn’t it mentioned that a huge number of them are innocent, but can’t be released because they now know we’re responsible for war crimes (like their own torture) and are sufficiently pissed off to become terrorists?

The only person arrested, tried, and convicted on 9/11 charges attended the University of Oklahoma. Zacharius Moussaoui failed his last semester at O.U. and was on academic suspension. That in turn caused his student visa to be invalid. He enrolled at the private flight school at Max Westheimer airport, which is operated by O.U. He failed that program. He called Muhammad Atta and he said he would drive from Minnesota to pick him up where both of them would take flight lessons on a 747 simulator there. Before he left O.U. for the last time, he went into the Bizzel Library and up to the 3rd floor reference desk. At that time, O.U. had open terminals all over campus, usually in open computer labs and libraries. There was no log in at any of them. Moussaoui then used an anonymous email service to send this one warning to president Clinton. “If the Republicans win the coming election (2000) my group will hijack large airliners and fly them into buildings in D.C. and NYC.” Clinton later said the warning got mixed with the thousands of other warnings he got all the time. Atta then picked him up and they went back to Minnesota. At the flight school there, Moussaoui acted strange according to flight instructor Clarence Prevost. Prevost said he was the only person ever to take his simulator class who even did not have a private pilot license. He noticed Moussaoui used $100 bills to pay the $8300 tuition. Prevost went to the head of the school and said, “Look this is not right, this guy is asking how to fly a 747 off of auto pilot at full throttle. We need to call the FBI because this guy is probably going to hijack an airliner some day and it will be tracked back to me and we will be out of business from all the suits.” So Prevost made the call to the FBI. The ran him through INS database and saw his visa had been revoked. They picked him up on an INS hold and confiscated his laptop, phone, and personal records. Those items were sealed up in a prisoner’s storage area at the jail. At that same time, Muhammad Atta was renting a motel in the Baltimore area to meet with the other “pilots” about plans. They were meeting their prior to the dry runs to test out getting box knives through security. The FBI had been notified by the NSA that Atta was meeting with other Saudi nationals and a covert task force was justified. Had these people all been US citizens and not Saudi Nationals on visitor visas, the FBI would have just set up the surveillance like they did on MLK. But they went to the president Clinton and asked for his approval for the wiretaps and listening devices in the motel rooms. Clinton said “NO.” He said it was not worth the loss of civil liberties even for visiting Saudi nationals and if the Saudi government found out, we could loose our air bases there. As they investigate Moussaoui more, the FBI wanted to access his laptop. Once again, he was a foreign national of France and Clinton once again said no on the warrant. So what could Clinton had done to keep 9/11 from going to plan? Easy, let the FBI have the Baltimore warrant. Had he done that, the whole plan would have been discovered and 9/11 would have been a headline “three hijackings foiled, thousands of lives saved.” So what actually happened? Clinton left office and gift wrapped 9/11 in a box, with a bow, and left it on the Resolute Desk for Bush. So, you say, well Bush was now the man, and he could now get those warrants cleared. Sorry, too late. Atta was done meeting and finished with the dry runs. He only needed to wait out September. Besides, SAIC does a routine file clearance of each president’s collection and seals it up in the secure national archives. A new president has no ability whatsoever to see any prior president’s emails, plans, actions, or activities on computers or in the white house or oval office. SAIC does offline archival of the files and they cannot be revealed until statutory limits are reached. This actually caused a lot of problems because SAIC had to do extensive searching to find the Moussaoui email.
What about Clarence Prevost who told the FBI that Moussaoui was going to hijack a heavy airliner? Well Bush rewarded him with $5 million dollars. Clinton later said, “I don’t think his warning was that valuable if at all.”

I wonder if they tell them about the trillions spent on Top Secret America since the 9/11 attacks, and how the intelligence services have compromised Americans’ civil rights.

Does anybody mention the traces of thermite permeating the zone of the only steel high rise buildings in history to undergo a complete collapse solely because of fire? Or that there wasn’t a single telephone, computer, desk, or other piece of office furniture found in the rubble, which was all dust, except for the steel girders?

Public Takeover - my computer can barely survive a fall off my desk let alone being crushed under the weight of 1000’s of tons of pressure and 100"s if not 1000’s of degrees of heat from the burning jet fuel.

Some day the young soldiers as well as the prisoners at Gitmo will know the truth of 9/11 and not just propaganda. Next week, twelve years after the 9.11.01 horror, deaths and destruction it is again time to rethink and question the evidence that brought down not 2 but 3 WTC buildings on that dreadfully sad day. It is impossible to have controlled demolitions of steel frame buildings without explosives. Many people have questioned how the most militarily powerful, wealthiest nation in the world—plus every federal branch and agency of government could be caught so unaware and unable to respond. But were they unaware?
Here is an interesting link: http://911summary.com/

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